Tilting at Windmills

...Their greedy insistence on collecting benefits they don’t need is encouraged by cowardly leaders like Bill Clinton and George Bush...

...Franklin A. Thomas, president of the Ford Foundation, makes $422,426...

...CNN is the winner of our Chickenshit Campaign Expos6 Award for its revelation that one of Jerry Brown’s telephone operators suggested to a donor who wanted to give more than $100 that each of his family members could give that amount iiS well...

...The absurdity and expense of public employee pensions will soon dwarf the savings and loan scandal...

...This means there is an excellent chance that the appellant will be dead before he can be retried...

...Because of Woodward and Bernstein, the Post felt it owned the story and was not going to permit a competitor to get a leg up...

...Steven A. Schroeder, “but there is a strong correlation between the frequency of that surgery and a nation’s investment in doctors and technology to perform it...

...How could CNN present such a relatively innocent act as a major scandal...

...If you want to get your point across to a big shot, all you have to do is lease a plane and offer the official a lift wherever he wants to go...

...Even in m:y hometown, Charleston, West Virginia, where the average salary is modest indeed, the president of the United Way gets $77,000...

...It’s time to tell them the truth...

...If all this helped improve health, its merit would at least be arguable...

...On election morning next November, count on reading my article in the Times urging the nation to re-elect George Bush...

...I n case you missed the article “Our Do-Nothing Government,” which appeared on the op-ed page of The New York Times on March 30, it was written by an official of the Bush administration who, according to the Times, “requested anonymity for fear of reprisal...

...To veteran observers of the bureaucracy, McPeak sounds like he knows what he’s doing...

...They include trips to Lake Tahoe and San Diego, dinner at the Fairmont Hotel, and my favorite...

...Either by design or default, almost every federal agency has been guilty in the past two years of moving only in accordance with a political reaction to an event-not a moment before and not an inch beyond what is needed to quiet things down...

...On the other hand, his insistence that Air Force personnel wear V-neck instead of crew-neck T-shirts suggests to the same observers that he has his own petty bureaucratic tendencies...

...He had to get approval from the county board of supervisors for the changes...

...make more money...

...Think of all the correspondence the physician could attend to, not to mention the phone calls he could return or the journal articles he could read...

...The New York Times was indifferent, and The Washington Post ran an account of the story on page 13...

...Because they had suddenly found out they were going to have to pay...

...gets $346,500, and Gilbert M. Grosvenor, president of the National Geographic Society, gets $343,701...

...The New York Times, which has endorsed Clinton, ran the unhappy fact, but buried it inside on the crucial day preceding the primary...

...In one of the worst examples in recent history, the Los Angeles Times was again the victim when it found the Watergate “smoking gun”-Nixon’s injunction to Mitchell, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman that “I want you to stonewall it...

...Causey is a must-read on Mondays, when he publishes letters from federal workers...

...What did we do...

...4 few hours after the piece appeared, he announced that he would riot do so...

...Not even the Post’s own reporters read the column...

...Only The Philadelphia Inquirer gave it front-page prominence...

...I thought that by telling the truth about bureaucratic perks and cons This was exactly the reaction I we would win the respect of at least the idealists inside the government...

...This was in the Bradlee era, when any inclination to credit other papers, as the editors of the Lm Angeles Times will attest, was thoroughly suppressed...

...The real outrage in American politics is not when people conspire to give hundreds of dollars to ii candidate...

...The Associated Press tried to prove the scanner was an advanced model Bush should not have been expected to know about...

...Instead of admitting that Rosenthal had been smart enough to spot something in a “pool” report that was available to the entire press corps, his competitors became obsessed with knocking the story they had missed...

...William Aramony’s salary of $463,000 may have been the most shocking revelation of the United Way scandal, but there are a lot of other fellows out there who are doing well by doing good...

...This is far better than the impersonality of television, with its temptation to run commercials that are always misleadingly affirmative about the candidate or deceptively negative about his opponent...

...On the other hand, the head of the organization that has traditionally done the best job of helping...

...Then you have the whole trip to lobby on behalf of your cause...

...Here in Washington, where one out of every 15 citizens works for the city and where policemen and firemen retire after 20 years of service and other public servants as early as age 55 with 30 years’ service, the entire middle class will have to flee because it won’t be able to afford the taxes these pensions will require...

...Peter L. Giovacchini recently recommended this novel approach at a conference sponsored by Massachusetts General Hospital and summarized in a report in Clinical Psychiatry News...

...After noting the “risk-averse in-box approach that pervades all When you’re down in Miami, you see all the well-to-do senior citizens who have plenty of money to do what they want to do...

...I have long believed that the most dangerous combination in the world is a Republican making policy and a civil servant carrying it out, because neither really wants to do anything...

...One patient, according to the report, “slept through six months of sessions...

...The reason is that specialists “Bill and Hillary Clinton took 136 free plane rides from rich friends, corporations, and the Democratic Party as he geared up for his presidential race in the past two years,” the Associated Press recently reported...

...Charles Peters...

...is getting worse...

...It doesn’t require a high degree of cynicism to suspect that the physicians involved will be grateful for the referral and express that gratitude by prescribing Rogaine...

...You must campaign the old-fashioned way-by getting out and getting to know the voters...

...The problem for society is that the costly procedures specialists frequently advocate are a tremendous burden on Medicare, Medicaid, and other insurance programs...

...Once a prominent Post reporter seemed to have lifted a story from The Detroit News...

...it’s when the big boys give thousands, tens of thousands, and hundreds of thousands...

...Even my favorite cartoonist, the sainted Herblock, has joined in the attack with a cartoon depicting an obviously demented Brown holding a placard that reads, “Dial 1-800-NUTCAKE...

...Its important story (see the Monthly Journalism Award, page 16) revealing that George Bush, as vice president and president, consistently went out of his way to help Saddam Hussein, even up to the moment of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, was practically ignored by the rest of the big-time press...

...The “evidence” was that approximately one fifth of the judges Brown appointed had contributed to one or more of his campaigns...

...Some might find this disheartening, hut I see a silver lining...

...We repealed the bill...

...At least you do something good for the country...

...In other developed countries the figure ranges from 50 to 75 percent...

...Instead, they whispered in my ear, “Don’t print that...

...Speaking of doctors who might be on the take, have you seen the Upjohn commercial that urges balding men to call an 800 number for the name of a doctor who will help them decide whether Rogaine will cure their hair loss...

...a glossy 300-page travel magazine informing doctors of various exotic places they can go for continuing education credit...

...Any challenger with wit and drive can find ways to become hiown in his district before he runs...

...Retirement income is based on the last three years of salary, so you see why 1994 is a magic number...

...One reform we should import from Britain immediately is its limit on campaign spending by candidates for Parliament...

...Of course, the only catch is that not all of us can afford to rent a plane-which explains why some of us have more influence than others...

...This is further evidence of the political establishment’s desperate desire to kill Brown’s campaign finance reforms...

...An example is 1 he comedy Green Card, in which the engaging Gkrard Depardieu displays his independence by smoking...

...In fact, I’m sure some doctors are already claiming continuing medical education credits for these hours...

...Eighty-two percent of physicians say drug salesmen offer them gifts as encouragement to prescribe their employers’ drugs, according to a report by Richard P. Kusserow, the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services...

...People who have modifiers in their names are an endangered species...

...When the meeting ended, the ambassador offered them the use of his rented plane so they could extend their visit,” a Clinton aide told AP...

...And speaking of pensions, let me not forget to roast once again the affluent among my fellow senior citizens (I hit 65 last December...

...But if the Times was the sinner in this case, lately it has been more sinned against...

...That’s why I’m delighted to be able to offer you a sure thing, or what experienced bettors call “a mortal lock...

...He caught the Supreme Court agreeing to hear an appeal at the same time it confirmed an execution date for the appellant...

...But the fact is that we are less healthy than many developed nations...

...If I write an op-ed piece for The New York Times urging one course of action, immediately bet your bankroll that the opposite will happen...

...D i d you know that only 30 percent bf our physicians &-e general practitioners...

...Alan Dershowitz so excels at self-promotion that I am reluctant to add fuel to the fire he so solicitously stokes, but I must pass on a point he made recently...

...Even the good guys were afraid of the truth...

...T h i s can’t be an “Only In California” because the same kind of chicanery is happening all over the country, but in this case it occurred in Los Angeles County...

...They provide a unique window into the mind of the civil servant...

...They were going to have to pay as much as $700 of their annual levels ofthe government,” the author observed: my agency and others dutifully exercise caution in substantive matters, avoid action, and continually seek another clearance, another signature, another authorization until somebody just finally says no...

...Recalling the period in the early eighties when a slew of horror stories appeared about people being wiped out by the cost of a catastrophic illness and people started calling for Congress to do something, he told a reporter: “OK, we passed the bill-a damn good piece of legislation as a matter of fact...

...Now you know the secret of access to important officials...

...I noted the apparent theft in this column...

...But the inside-the-Beltway crowd is seething at the threat Brown’s idea presents to its continued reign...

...Gambling is, as we all know, a risky business...

...People who had the ability to pay had to pay a higher premium than those who didn’t...

...Have you noticed how many characters in movies are smoking these days...

...And that figure includes general internists and general pediatricians...

...And Howard Kurtz, The Washington Post’s journalism critic, suggested that Rosenthal was wrong about the facts, presumably not realizing that the Post itself had reported the same facts, only at the end, rather than the beginning, of its story...

...That night, Bush ordered the attack on Iraq...

...T h e existence of the daisy chain is, unfortunately, more than a tidbit for journalistic insiders: It means that jealousy toward the competition can keep the public from learning important facts...

...I wrote, “Don’t go to war...

...The Washington Post relegated that revelation to the back pages...

...The New York Times also downplayed another important story developed by the Los Angeles Times (and The Washington Post) revealing that Bill Clinton had failed to disclose that he had received a draft induction notice...

...The Rockefeller Foundation’s Peter C. Goldmark Jr...

...The reason is that their pensions will then increase dramatically because of the salary raises they got in 199 1, ranging from $16,000 to $24,000...

...income toward health care...

...got to the first issues of The Washington Monthly in 1969...

...Recently the San Jose Mercury News looked into the gifts drug companies are offering California doctors...

...The guilty party in another injustice to Brown is the LQS Angeles Times, which ran a frontpage story (that the rest of the national media quickly picked up) accusing Brown of appointing lawyers who had made contributions to his campaign to the bench...

...One recent example was a letter complaining that Causey was revealing too much about federal employees’ benefits: “But you’re making it look so good I worry it will tick off a lot of private-sector folks...

...The chief administrative officer, Richard B. Dixon, recommended a few changes in the way pensions for county employees were calculated...

...To complete the daisy chain, The New York Times itself was recently screwed by its competitors’ reaction to Andrew Rosenthal’s amusing story about how the miracle of electronic checkout amazed George Bush at a national grocers’ conference...

...It is sometimes argued that spending limits favor incumbents who may be better known than their challengers...

...Air Force Chief of Staff Merrill McPeak is reducing his headquarters staff by 21 percent, getting rid of 15 of its 58 generals...

...Fewer than one fourth of graduating medical students now intend to have general practices...

...The greater danger is tha.t incumbents can raise much more money than the challengers precisely because of their incumbency...

...It may not be as bad today as in the thirties, when practically every actor had a cigarette between his lips, but I fear the result will be the same: another generation addicted to nicotine...

...Do you recall as vividly as I do the television reports of Dan Rostenkowski’s automobile in Chicag-and how they were literally trying to turn his automobile over, they were so angry at him...

...He just wanted to talk to them...

...Another example of what can be learned from Causey is found in his recent column, “Waiting for a Windfall,” which explains why much of the bureaucratic elite-the Senior Executive Service-will retire during the month of January in 1994...

...Charleston’s downandout, the Salvation Army, gets only $23,000...

...As I’ve already written, I agree with Brown cornpletely on this one...

...You can’t escape listening to them and learning about their problems...

...But have you heard about what might be called the solo sleep treatment, in which the patient dozes away his hourly appointment...

...Unfortunately, the situation in the U.S...

...Warren Rudman recently announced his retirement from the Senate and thereby acquired the courage to speak out about the scandal...

...For a decade or so after the dangers of tobacco were confiied, only an occasional neurotic villain would light up on screen...

...It may be true, but our enemies will use it against us...

...Since it figures that roughly half the lawyers in California are Democrats and most of them contribute to campaigns-as anyone who has worked in politics knows, lawyers are the most politically active of all professionals-one fifth is actually quite modest...

...On an April morning this One January morning last year, year, I urged Piid Tsongas to reenter the race...

...s ince I’ve been involved in journalism, the source that has been most underutilized by my peers has been Mike Causey’s Federal Diary in The Washington Post...

...By now we’ve all read about psychiatrists who sleep with their patients...

...He probably would have continued to do so had it not been for a concerned taxpayer in Hawthorne who asked why so much of the city’s budget was being used to pay for collect phone calls from Hawaii...

...If you’re running for the House of Commons, you can’t spend more than the equivalent of $15,000 and you can’t buy television time...

...TILTING AT WINDMILLS Here’s an item for our “Only In California” department...

...These are the people who can .go on cruises...

...Unfortunately, this means a number of senior turkeys are holding on for dear life while some of their brightest juniors are being tempted to leave government because they can’t be promoted to the positions the turkeys are clinging to...

...One of these rides was a free trip from Aspen, Colorado to Little Rock on a plane leased by Bandar bin Sultan, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States, whom the Clintons had met at a governors’ conference in Aspen...

...I t ’ s sad how the Washington establishment has united against Jerry Brown’s 800 number and $100 campaign contribution limit...

...You won’t be surprised to learn that those changes resulted in a pension of 9; 127,000 for Dixon-and for each of the retiring supervisors...

...You’re sure to collect...

...There is, for example, no correlation between the rate of coronary artery disease and the frequency of bypass surgery,” writes Dr...

...The average doctor receives 28 such offers a year, ranging up to $38,315 in value...

...Excessive layering is one of the main problems of Washington bureaucracy...

...For ;he past four years, the city clerk of Hawthorne had been collecting his official salary while living in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii where he sells houses and runs a beauty salon...

...And if you get defeated while doing it, well, it will be worth doing it...

...What we have done is eliminate an awful lot of assistants and deputies and vices,” he told an interviewer...

...Causey called to say, “I printed that story six weeks ago...